Curanderxs of Freedom: Learning Practices for Reclamation and Liberation with Youth

• In Event: Growing, Sharpening and Envisioning Our Tools: The Mapping Carcerality, Imagining Freedom, and (Re)Membering Selves Project

Abstract

Objectives.
This paper interrogates the experiences of youth who took part in structured decolonial and liberatory freedom dreaming. We present the texts, discussion questions, and activities used before, during, and after the Mapping Carcerality, Imagining Freedom, and (Re)Membering Selves Project [MIR] in order to document our strategy for engaging students in activities intended to concretize theoretical concepts like decolonization and freedom dreaming. We highlight individual and collective learnings, tensions, and insights identified by youth participants and invite the youth involved to assign meaning and relevance to these findings, while prioritizing educational, social, and emotional implications for advancing learning for critical consciousness, healing, and liberation.

Theoretical Framework.
The Historian as Curandera (Morales, 1998) grounds our approach to challenging colonial logics and to affirm the possibility of collective healing, freedom, and transformation through historical recovery and narrative reconstruction. As curanderos, students were invited to break free from the constraints of Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heteronormative modes of knowledge production and consider the implications of a praxis of epistemic freedom, where historically subjugated peoples narrate their own truths and co-author the present and future. As curanderos, we tend to emotional, spiritual, and communal wounds as a healing praxis and engage in processes of remembrance and repair, while cultivating “decolonial imaginary” (Perez, 1999) to reimagine what could have been and might still be, and to envision and enact new realities grounded in justice, dignity, and possibility.

Data and Methods.
This paper draws from document analysis and qualitative data gathering strategies that analyze pre-trip preparation meetings and discussions that took place online and in person, documentation of experiences, reflections, and discussion that took place in Alabama, and post-trip reflection interviews that help to portray student-identified shifts in consciousness and sensemaking over time. In addition, we draw from the texts that were introduced, and center the following essential questions that we returned to repeatedly as individuals and as a collective: What does it mean to be free? What is carcerality? What is praxis? How is praxis connected to freedom? How is storying and reclaiming authorship over our own lives and stories connected to our struggles for freedom? How do stories contribute to the reproduction of injustice or advance freedom?

Findings and Scholarly Significance.
Students highlight the experiences, activities, and other factors that contribute to their ability to denaturalize the inequity in their lives and in society. By doing so, they identify possibilities for young people to navigate space and time with greater intention, and offer insights and strategies for those who work with youth, in formal and informal learning settings, that can be utilized to move with them toward emancipatory horizons. In this paper, students offer guidance, as curanderos, to transform history away from narratives that produce hopelessness, and toward lessons of empowerment and mobilization.

Authors

• Kevin Hernandez, Arts for Healing and Justice Network

• Joaquin Noguera, Loyola Marymount Universtiy